Thoughts on life, God and faith from a local church minister and teacher

Monday, September 16, 2013

Think We're The Center of the Universe? Think Again.

Dateline: Monday, September
5th, 1977

Gasoline costs 62 cents a gallon. The top rated TV show is
“Charlie’s Angels”. “Star Wars” breaks box office records. At the disco you can
boogie down to “Keep It Comin’ Love” by K.C. and the Sunshine band and wear your
powder blue leisure suit. Techies rave about Radio Shack’s new home computer,
the TRS 80.President Jimmy Carter signs
a treaty to hand over control of the Panama Canal.
Carl Yastrzemski leads the Sox over the Blue Jays 6-0. NASA launches the
Voyager I spacecraft to study the outer solar system, hoping the ship will
successfully send back information about the universe for the next four years.

Dateline, Monday,
September 5th, 2013

Gasoline costs $3.65 a gallon.The top rated TV show is Sunday Night
Football.Miley Cyrus’ twerking on MTV
blasts her song “Wrecking Ball” up the charts.“Iron Man III” total box office is $1.4 billion dollars. Google averages
388 million visits a day. The U.S.
threatens to bomb Syria.
Led by Stephen Drew, the first place Sox beat the Yankees 9-8 in extra innings.

Oh, and one more news flash from that
day. NASA announces Voyager I has left our solar system, traveled 11.8 billion
miles in thirty six years. Even more amazing, it is still transmitting discoveries
about space back to those of us living here on little old earth. Kind of
unbelievable. Kind of puts things in perspective.

How far is 11.8 billion miles? 127
round trips to the sun.Voyager is so
far away now and still going, that its radio signals take 17 hours and 22
minutes just to get back to earth.It is
so “out there” in the vastness of creation that its next major encounter with a
“known” star will be in 40,000 years. That long ago on planet earth our cave
dwelling relatives shared the world with Neanderthals. In 120,000 human
generations I wonder who might be around to “listen” if Voyager is still
talking.

The vast and dark and huge space which
Voyager whirls through—just how big is it? No one knows for sure. The farthest
distant point NASA scientists have been able to “see” is 14 billion light years
away so light traveling from there, back to us, at 700 million miles per hour puts
that star how far away? I don’t know. My calculator doesn’t work at that level.
Let’s just say it’ll take more than a tank of gas to get there.

Trying to comprehend the cosmos
that Voyager is still mapping is a humbling exercise. Yet still, we humans are an
odd lot even in the face of such infinity. We can easily presume our diminutive
planet is the center of all things.That
the limited time we claim on earth, our era, our epoch, our culture: it so
important. So world changing. So significant. So one of a kind. Never been
before. Never to be seen again. I guess that’s kind of natural for any species,
to view itself as the big man on the cosmos campus.

To see ourselves as almighty, capable of taming nature, understanding
existence, cracking the “God” gene, manipulating DNA, making machines
intelligent, masters of the universe.We
are the champions!The height of God’s
Creation, even. Heck we twerk! That’s one for the ages, huh?

And then a story like the Voyager
tale comes along and it reminds us that humans are just tiny little
participants, specks in a universe that is so big, so huge, and so unfathomable
in size and mystery.When we remember
that truth, it can change, perhaps, how we see life, and ourselves. It can remind
us to take our rightful place in all things. Maybe we are not the center of the
universe after all.

Neil Armstrong, the first human to
walk on the moon, tells of how he felt while standing on the lunar surface in
1969, looking back at earth floating in a black sky. “It suddenly struck me
that this tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the earth. I put up my thumb and shut
one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet earth. I didn't feel like a giant.
I felt very, very small.”

Fellow citizens of the third rock from the
sun. Here’s a hope. Let’s remember just who we are and where we stand in the
universe.Admit we are small, and the
universe is all. We matter, yes, but no more and no less than any other of our
fellow humans or fellow creatures or any other life which just might exist
somewhere “out there”.That’s a
perspective we could all use.

So: GO VOYAGER GO! Keep on
traveling. May your journey remind us to take our rightful place in God’s
universe, on the tiny blue marble we all call home.